The woman thought for a second and replied, “Well, heaven is certainly lovely, but I actually had a better time in hell. I choose hell.”

For Columbus Day, I assigned my third-grade class the task of drawing one of Columbus’s three ships. I had no sooner sat down when a boy came up with his paper, which had a lone dot in the middle.

Interestingly a parallel exists in biology, known as the ‘overload principle’, which is commony applied to fitness and exercising, ie., in order to develop fitness and/or strength the exercise must be sufficiently demanding to increase existing levels, but not so demanding as to cause damage or strain.

It so happened that another test laboratory in a different part of the world was involved in assessing bird-strikes – in this case on the windshields and drivers’ cabs of new very high speed trains. The train test engineers had read about the pioneering test developed by the aerospace team, and so they approached them to ask for specifications of the gun and the testing methods. The aerospace engineers duly gave them details, and the train engineers set about building their own simulation.

When the baby was brand new, and we were frazzled first time parents (not much has changed), we left his stroller in the parking lot of a local shopping plaza. In the hustle and bustle of trying to get him fed, changed, and strapped into the carseat, we just completely forgot his stroller. Later, we realized our mistake and returned to the scene of the crime. The stroller was gone. We assumed it had been stolen but asked around anyways.

Checking to see that his instructions got through, he walked up to one recruit. “Stand, up, sir!” he yelled. The recruit stood up and faced the sergeant.

“Our floodlights were crap,” he explains. “When we produced a brochure to assist our promotion campaign I put a picture of an evening game in there with the lights on. Underneath I wrote, ‘An evening game at Plough Lane showing the quality of the floodlights’. Everybody read it as meaning they were fantastic when they were awful. There was a lot of kidology involved.”

Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.” Brits have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great plague of 1666.

With only a few minutes before the event was to start, however, my Mac wouldn’t hook up to their projection system. I didn’t have any other cable to make that happen, and neither did the hotel. Again the hotel manager came through and called an IT person and they tried to help me. Nothing worked. So one of my contacts had a portable USB memory stick and I transferred the slides I was going to use to it and then we used the event’s computer. And to top that off one of the contacts had to manually hit “next” on her computer to change the slides.

Back in the ‘90s, when Vince McMahon cared a lot more about the morality and image of his wrestlers’ personal lives, he called a meeting and banned them all from patronizing strip clubs – citing The Undertaker and Kevin Nash as the biggest offenders. Shortly afterward (possibly in Philadelphia), according to Nash: “I walk in the strip club, I look around, there’s none of the boys, and I’m like, ‘Alright, I’m cool’. So I go and get up in a corner, my eyes adjust to the room, I look over, and I see this big guy in a black leather coat … and he just goes . I walked over and sat down next to him and said, ‘Well, nice to see you listened.’ He said, “Nice to see you listened too’.”